Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday July 02, 2010 @03:50PM
from the arrr-me-hearties dept.

crimeandpunishment writes
"The US government is making colleges and universities join in the fight against digital piracy by threatening to pull federal funding. Beginning this month, a provision of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 requires colleges to have plans to combat unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials on their networks. Colleges that don't do enough could lose their eligibility for federal student aid. 'Their options include taking steps to limit how much bandwidth can be consumed by peer-to-peer networking, monitoring traffic, using a commercial product to reduce or block illegal file sharing or "vigorously" responding to copyright infringement notices from copyright holders.'"

Pretty much. The network belongs to the College and just like any other ISP, if they want to allow downloading they should be able to

More than that, they should be considered to be a carrier and to be immune so long as they DON'T do any filtering, and responsible for all traffic originating from their network if they do any filtering. And in fact nothing in this piece of shit^Wlegislation contradicts that:p

$100/semester? That's cheap. I work at a University and I'm involved with some of the decisions that go on at the border:

Implementation of firewall (hasn't been one until this year), bandwidth shaper and intrusion detection:Syslog server + syslog license upgrade (not kidding): $50,000/year, $2000/year support contract2 Cisco 6500 chassis with 10Gig modules: $60,000, $5000/year support contractRedundant IBM IDS: $100,000, $10,000/year support contractRedundant Traffic shaper upgrade: $20,0005 consultants for 3 years: ~$2,000,000Taking away time with meetings from 15 other employees because the contractors don't know what they're doing: ~$500,000 in lost timeHaving the existing network team do the planning, communication, testing and implementation from scratch in 2 months: infuriatingNoticing that some of the vendors haven't actually tested their equipment in real life with 10GigE and multiple mult-gigabit Internet, Internet2 and MAN connections and thus coming short in processing capacity: even more infuriatingNoticing that everything you just bought are just Linux/Unix-flavor boxes with Xeon processors and mostly open source software: priceless

Well, for starter is might be because the schools (K-12) are actively teaching the benefits of piracy. You know, the teacher tells the students that this new piece of software for everyone to use actually costs $500 but she got it for free from www.thepiratebay.com and there is lots of other stuff out there - they should check it out. Next day one of the students is telling the others what great stuff he found out there and spreads it around.

Think it doesn't happen? Wrong.

Your credit card fraud item is a joke, right? You haven't been paying attention. There are criminal gangs operating all over the world that do this sort of thing, generally from relatively law-free places or places where the cops respond very well to bribes. How you going to stop it?

For both piracy and credit card fraud, it doesn't cost anyone anything and nobody can do anything about it. Live with it. If you are upset about credit card fraud, consider it just another aspect of a generally law-free Internet. It is going to happen. It happens to me once a year on average and it has yet to cost me anything.